.hack// Another Birth Vol. 1

.hack Another Birth Vol 1And the binge continues…

.hack// Another Birth starts a new storyline in the .Hack universe. This time, it’s the same story told in the .Hack games for the PS2, only told from the point of view of (game) secondary character BlackRose. In PS2 land, the story spanned 4 games, and this is Vol 1 of 4, so I’m assuming each book will cover the events of a different game. I did play through the first game but never finished #2. From what I recall of the story, the book is pretty true to the source material although a lot of side characters have been dropped or are only mentioned in passing.

These books take place a good deal after AI Buster. Orca and Balamung, two minor characters from that story, have become celebs inside The World for being the team that completed the event “The Final Sin.” Now Orca has been attacked and killed in-game by a strange ‘data bug.’ Weirdly, when his avatar fell, the player himself passed out and lapsed into a coma. The same thing has happened to BlackRose’s brother, and she enters The World to find out what is going on and how to help her brother. Kite, the main character from the game and the secondary in this book, is a real-life friend of Orca’s and was with him when the data bug attacked. So he and BlackRose have a common goal.

On the plus side, Another Birth bypasses all the ‘how to play’ stuff that was in AI Buster, so we can get right into the story. However it’s very much a 4-part story and not much is wrapped up at the end of this volume. Also, Akira Hayami (BlackRose’s real name) is a high school student struggling with the jealousy of older girls on her tennis team and other teen-age girl problems that are about as interesting to me as watching paint dry. The tone skews even younger than the earlier books, too. I’m not sure if this is due to the source material or the translation (the book was originally written by a Japanese author) but I suspect its the translation, in the same way so many English anime dubs ‘dumb down’ the content since they figure cartoons are for kids.

And yet…and yet…. I will keep reading the series, and for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why. I think it still goes back to my love of MMOs in theory, and my inability to ever find an MMO that I’m truly comfortable in. Reading these books is like playing an MMO without all the annoying parts, in a way. I’m living vicariously through these characters, I guess. In general terms, though, I don’t think I could recommend this book.

.Hack// AI Buster 2

.Hack AI Buster 2I just can’t help myself. I can’t eat just one! I’ve got all these serious books on my shelf that need to be read and here I am again, consuming literary junk food. But I’m just hooked on these .Hack Project properties. .Hack// AI Buster 2 is a short story collection, with the stories scattered chronologically through the .Hack timeline.

Some of them are good, at least one is pretty bad. None of them are very substantial. But somehow that’s part of the appeal. It’s like seeing a silhouette through a window shade. Shadowy images…enough to intrigue, but not enough to satisfy. Um, ok so now I sound like a voyeur. 🙂 In this volume we get more glimpses at the players themselves, which I find interesting. I think my favorite story was the first one, which showed the events of AI Buster 1 through the eyes of Hokuto, the newbie side-kick, who is much more interesting on the other side of the computer screen.

Still not great books. But another fun guilty escape. Lots of stuff going on in my life right now, and too often by the end of the day I’m just not up to facing the heavier reading on my bookshelf. In fact, I have a few more of these .hack books and I think I’m going to jump right into the next one!

Chore Wars

Thanks to Penny Arcade for pointing this out. Chore Wars has to be the geekiest idea I’ve seen in a while. Ok, maybe since yesterday. Here’s how it works (I surmise, personally I’m much too lazy for something like this). You and your fellow house or office mates sign up. You create lists of household or office chores and assign experience points to each one. Then as you do chores, you mark them off on the Chore Wars site. Rack up major experience points and level up!!

I mean really, who needs World of Warcraft when you have Chore Wars!!?

Murder is so entertaining

Maybe this is old news, but I just became aware of a new reality show. This show, and I’m not going to give it free publicity by mentioning either the name or the network, sets two teams of ‘normal’ people against each other in a competition to solve a murder case. The twist is that these are real murders. Each show comes “complete with a gruesome recreated crime scene and real crime footage” taken from the closed case files of homicide departments across the U.S.

Oh boy! So if you’ve lost a loved one to a brutal crime, you can at least take some consolation from the fact that the person’s murder will provide entertainment for millions of twisted TV viewers. (Note sarcasm.)

Really, it’s just one step closer to snuff films, isn’t it? But heaven forbid our children catch a glimpse of an exposed breast on TV. Now *that* is cause for great alarm.

.Hack// AI Buster 1

.Hack// AI Buster 1This one was definitely a guilty pleasure. With all the heavier reading I’ve been doing, I was looking for something light and fast to break up my reading sessions a bit. .Hack// AI Buster 1 by Tatsuya Hamazaki fit the bill nicely. (Amazon incorrectly lists Rei Idumi as one of the authors. Rei Idumi is listed as illustrator in the book.)

The .hack Project (sometimes written as “dotHack”) is a series of manga, anime, videogames and novels all set in The World, a fictitious MMO (massively multiplayer online game). Most of the action takes place inside the game, but the characters, like characters in real MMOs, shift their focus between events in-game and events in real-life. A big part of the draw of the various parts of the .Hack project, to me, is how well the creators replicate the culture of these games. Guild drama, PKing, exploiting bugs, wondering who is really behind the avatar….if these concepts mean nothing to you then you probably won’t ‘get’ the .Hack material. As an avid MMO player I gobble it up gleefully. Reading/watching/playing .Hack properties is almost as fun as playing a good MMO.

As to this particular novel…guilty pleasure or not, I have to say it isn’t a great book. It feels more like an establishing piece. The main character spends a lot of time talking to a ‘newbie’ about the mechanics of the game (in turn instructing the reader as to how these games work). The World as an MMO exists in the near future, so while the technology is a bit more advanced than what exists for us today, much of it is recognizable to real life MMO players, so a lot of these discussions between characters just felt like filler to me.

The actual story is very thin here. We have one character, an employee of the company that runs The World, chasing down a rogue AI. A bug, essentially. We have another character, with his newbie tag-along, trying to complete a quest. That’s really it. Some other characters are introduced but their stories are fleshed out in other .Hack properties. Not a lot of actual plot to chew on here.

Worse is that the author chose what I’d call a First Person Limited viewpoint. I can’t really explain this without a spoiler, but honestly the plotline isn’t compelling enough for this to really matter anyway. Nevertheless you’ve been warned. INCOMING SPOILERS! The book bounces between these two main characters, both told in first person. Neither character indicates in any way that they are aware of the other. The big reveal at the end of the book is… they’re the same character! During the ‘bug-hunter’ chapters the character is referred to by his real world name, since most of these chapters take place outside The World. During the ‘quest’ chapters the character is referred to by his in-game name. It really felt to me like the author was cheating. If you’re going to write from a first person viewpoint, you can’t ‘hide’ things like this from the reader. And it wasn’t even like “A-ha! So that is why X did Y when Z happened!” because ‘neither’ character ever really used what the other knew in any apparent way. If just felt like the author was stuck and suddenly decided at the end of the manuscript that these two characters were the same person and never went back to rewrite the earlier chapters.

But the oddest thing of all? I still enjoyed the book. Now take that in context. First, I’m an MMO gamer and more generally I’m fascinated with online culture. Second, it’s a YA book that I read in a couple of short evening reading sessions, so I didn’t make a major time commitment to it. My demands on it weren’t very high. Yeah, the plot was weak, but… It was like having a candy bar wear the nougat center wasn’t all that great, but the caramel layer and chocolate surrounding the nougat were sugary bliss. Not the greatest food in the world, but it satisfied a craving at the time.

A new one for Websters

I’m pleased to announce a new word that I just invented: editoring.

Editing, as we all know, means to edit something. But an editor does a lot more than just edit things, right? Editors – in particular magazine editors – manage freelancers, create and maintain editorial calendars, discuss layouts, plan issues, and so forth. None of this can be considered ‘editing’ really. So what is it? It’s editoring.

Please help spread this term around by using it at least twice a day in casual conversation. Thank you.

I’m pretty sure I’ll end up wildly rich and famous thanks to this contribution to the English language. But don’t worry, I’ll remember all the little people when I’m on top of the world.

Thought Bubble

Imagining that extra preparation makes for better writing is like assuming that the more books we read on weight loss, the thinner we’ll become.

The Courage to Write by Ralph Keyes, page 91.

Ahem… um. Guilty on both counts.

I used to have another blog, primarily for myself, where I collected random bits and thoughts like this. Since that blog is no more I guess I’ll have to start collecting them here.